Will Facebook’s New Feature Bring Us Back To Reality?

It’s been a couple of weeks since Facebook finally came up with “Your Time on Facebook “feature – A time measuring additive which is designed to manage, and track your social networking activity. The tool actually keeps a tab on how many hours you have been spending in a day on Facebook. The feature still about to be rolled all around the world shall involve a dashboard which shall keep account of your social networking engagement for a week on an average. One can also set a daily limit as to how many hours they want to be engaged and receive reminders based on that to take off from Facebook. Additionally, one would also have shortcut access to News Feed, Friend Request and other notifications. For certain places where the rollout has been made functional, one can access it easily under Facebook More tab, then move to settings and privacy and then “Your time on Facebook”.

There is no denying the fact that Facebook has been eyeing to bring in this feature for quite some time but was delayed on several grounds. Facebook told the media that they wanted to spot the bugs early and find a remedy for the same. The feature will be also rolled out further to both Android and iOS, as we have already witnessed Instagram launching a similar feature; digital welfare is soon becoming a part of social networking. There have been several studies that point out how people are moving towards a virtual web slowly engulfing them without much respite.

In a time like this, the rollout of such a feature is a great move to keep a track of your otherwise productive hours being spent on just casual social networking, barring the time when you actually do business on Facebook. However, whether the launch of such a feature will influence people to shift or change their usage pattern, still remains a debatable issue. Having said that, it is necessary to harp that Facebook doesn’t have any strong indulgence to ease users off their usage, creating an impulse that would have them drop their smartphones to look around in real world. Instead, it just gives daily notification of how many hours you have been on Facebook. However, the biggest flaw in the fabric is perhaps how the feature treats all time spent in the very same fashion. Speaking on Q1 meet of Facebook, Zuckerberg himself was quite convincing to establish his view of using Facebook and social networking for that matter to reach, interact and build strong relations. This in turn when forged into positive outcomes for business would lead to happiness. But, instead just merely and passively consuming all the content that is thrown in your way is destined to have a negative impact.

Facebook’s new feature definitely needs some more threading, for instance, it should enable users to segregate between the useful and not so useful time spent on Facebook. Such an approach can only make the whole concept emerge altruistic and befitting for one and all.